


flowers grow from corpses, and the world keeps turning

by congratsyouvegrownasoul



Series: Tarth, After the War [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Mourning, Post-Canon, i think that's my most frequently used tag, in which Jaime lives a long and happy life with Brienne and eventually dies a natural death, let's be honest this will probably become AU, looking back on the past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 14:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/congratsyouvegrownasoul/pseuds/congratsyouvegrownasoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brienne visits her husband's grave, and thinks on their life together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	flowers grow from corpses, and the world keeps turning

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the basis for this a while ago, and just polished it up for publishing. While bittersweet, this is my idea of the best-case scenario for this pairing.

The lords of Tarth lie in their tombs on the mountainside, their graves grown over with moss and yellow flowers. Jaime, for all his lion’s blood, spent the latter half of his life on the Sapphire Isle, and here he is buried. Perhaps it had been his birthright to rule Casterly Rock, and perhaps when he was born, his father wished him to one day rest among the most valiant of their ancestors in the Hall of Heroes.

But the world has changed time and time again since the day Jaime Lannister was born holding on to his sister’s foot, and the power of lion’s blood is not as strong as it once was. Besides, Brienne’s Jaime, no Lannister hero, left the path that would have led to those tombs long ago. Her Jaime belongs more to the open sky and the deep blue sea, spread above and below, singing _freedom_.

Brienne had thought long over the stone likeness set above the grave, nearly five years before, when her husband was laid to rest. Which side of him would she show?

 Jaime, golden and young and wide-eyed, made a knight before he became a man, a child she’d never known?  That boy had died long before. Jaime, blazing and cruel and tormented, the man the whole country had known? That story she left for ballads and history books.

No stone-carver could capture all the broken pieces that made him up—green eyes bitter and playful by turns, his many different smiles. Sometimes it seemed to her Jaime had held himself together from sheer stubbornness, and maybe that was not far from the truth.

In the end, she had chosen a far simpler image. Her husband’s grave-statue is older and wiser than the past selves he had carried with him. He kneels, yes, but not in prayer, nor to a liege lord. His back is straight and proud, his face tilted towards the sky. Across his knees lies a sword half-sheathed. His left hand rests on the scabbard, while his right is unfinished, the rough lines of its stone mingling with the folds of his carved cloak. They had shown him one-handed because that was the truth, and he would not have thanked her for any lies.

She remembers the day he first beat her in a fight with his left hand, in the courtyard at Evenfall. The tip of her sword trailing in the dust, she had laughed for sheer joy, watching him shouting with triumph like a boy who had bested his father’s master-at-arms.

He could never win against her more than five times out of ten in all their years together, and that margin had slipped just a bit in her favor as he grew older and stiffer, before she began to do the same. She remembered sometimes the first time they’d ever fought, before the Bloody Mummers had taken his sword hand. He had been half-starved and out of practice, and still had nearly beaten her.

They’d spoken of the fights they’d never had, lying close together in bed. He’d wished to defeat her as handily as he would have in the days when he was a golden lion knight, and she’d wished to see him perfectly balanced and full of glory. But she preferred her tarnished, good-hearted left-handed warrior to what he had been, and told him so.

Sitting alone on the hillside, braiding the yellow grave-flowers of Tarth into a tight plait, like the ones she made visiting the tombs of her mother and brother as a little girl, Brienne’s life with Jaime spools out behind her.

This land has been good to them, she thinks. In the early dark days, when the island was still marked and charred from the wars that had raged around them, they woke up in the night sweating and screaming, suffocating under dreams of dead men walking, dead men burning, dead men hanging in trees. And dead women, too, throughout it all. And when the morning came, they looked past empty streets and uprooted trees, and saw the spotless seas, blue as her eyes. They hoped for peace, and for spring, and for life.

Jaime had found his redemption here, not in the heroism he’d dreamed of as an idealistic child, or longed for later with all the desperation of a man trying to find any good in himself. Perhaps the songs and maesters’ histories will still tell of Jaime Lannister as the Kingslayer, who struck the last knell of one war and sowed the seeds of another. Maybe some will mention that he had fought, in the end, for Sansa Stark in the battles at Winterfell, against the armies of the dead. But it won’t be in songs or stories that the other truths of him are shown, but in the fields of Tarth replanted after the war’s end, in the lands the two of them held together. Maybe his love for her, and their daughters, tall and sturdy as their mother, golden-haired as their father, will balance out his sins and the dead kings he fathered in the time before her.

 _Maybe_ is a word small as the delicate strand of petals clutched in her heavy hands, and yet as limitless as the sea.

Brienne sighs, and stands, and stoops to lay the flowers down. They drape over sword and hand and empty space, bright as a promise. She turns her back on the dead and the glimmering ocean, and walks down the mountain, turning towards home.


End file.
